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Patients' Responsibilities in Medical Ethics

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Patients' Responsibilities in Medical Ethics Philosophy Study, September 2016, Vol. 6, No. 9, 528-533 doi: 10.17265/2159-5313/2016.09.003 D DAVID PUBLISHING Patients’ Responsibilities in Medical Ethics Zhu Fengqing Harbin Institute of Technology There has been a shift from the general presumption that “doctor knows best” to a heightened respect for patient autonomy. Medical ethics remains one-sided, however. It tends (incorrectly) to interpret patient autonomy as mere participation in decisions, rather than a willingness to take the consequences. In this respect, medical ethics remains largely paternalistic, requiring doctors to protect patients from the consequences of their decisions. This is reflected in a one-sided account of duties in medical ethics. Medical ethics may exempt patients from obligations because they are the weaker or more vulnerable party in the doctor-patient relationship. We argue that vulnerability does not exclude obligation. We also look at others ways in which patients’ responsibilities flow from general ethics: for instance, from responsibilities to others and to the self, from duties of citizens, and from the responsibilities of those who solicit advice. Finally, we argue that certain duties of patients counterbalance an otherwise unfair captivity of doctors as helpers. Keywords: patients’ responsibility, medical ethical, mainstream medical ethics, patient, doctor 1. Introduction Medical ethics is one-sided. It dwells on the ethical obligations of doctors to the exclusion of those of patients. This one-sidedness may have something to do with the use in standard medical ethics of the concept of autonomy. We begin by calling attention to some of the limitations of that use of the concept. We then turn to the responsibilities that we think patients have to doctors: those that arise from general ethical obligations, and those that arise from the doctor-patient relationship. Finally, we consider how doctors ought to respond when patients fail in their duties to them. 2. The One-Sidedness of Medical Ethics Medical ethics tends to focus on only one side of the doctor-patient relationship. One reason for this is that standard writing in medical ethics is directed at a professional audience. The one-sidedness of mainstream medical ethics in respect of the doctor-patient relationship is more than a matter of being directed at an overly narrow audience. There is also an unevenness in the distribution of the moral burdens. Mainstream medical ethics puts a big and largely unconditional responsibility on doctors to treat patients “no questions asked.” This obligation can take either of two forms. In wartime, doctors are obliged to treat everyone equally—friend or foe. The peacetime counterpart of this is that paedophiles, rapists, and murders are supposed to be treated without reference to their crimes or moral character. Again, doctors treat patients without making judgments about the cause of their illness. What is learned during the history taking should not be permitted to color the doctor’s Zhu Fengqing, associate professor, Dr., Department of History of Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, China; main research fields: Philosophy of Science and Technology. PATIENTS’ RESPONSIBILITIES IN MEDICAL ETHICS 529 view of the patient, who must be treated impartially. Nor can doctors turn away patients who are in acute need of treatment but who cannot pay. In comparison to what it asks of doctors, mainstream medical ethics makes very few demands of patients, and these usually begin and end with consent. Traditionally, medical ethics has asserted that, as autonomous agents, competent patients must be allowed to decide for themselves the course of their medical treatment, and even whether to be treated at all. It is for the doctor to communicate effectively all the relevant information, assess the patient’s competence, persuade without coercing, and abide by whatever decision the patient makes. Little or nothing is said about what kinds of decisions patients ought to make. Nor is much said about their responsibilities for making good rather than bad decisions. Indeed, with the exception of recent literature on responsible uses of resources (a topic to which we will return), mainstream medical ethics implies that a competent patient’s decision is good simply by virtue of having been made by the patient. At times, it seems as though patients never make, or cannot make, bad decisions. Bad decisions may be explained away—sometimes by the courts—as the doctor’s failure to gain proper consent or failing this, the doctor’s failure to override the wishes of the patient and act in her best interests instead! Yet if autonomy in medical ethics is to mean the same as in general ethics—and surely it is supposed to—autonomy must go hand in hand with taking responsibility for what is chosen. In particular, if things go badly, a decision made by a patient cannot suddenly turn into a piece of negligence on the doctor’s part. But in medical ethics, the duty of care often trumps the need for autonomous patients to take the bad consequences of the bad choices they knowingly make. Even though one of the justifications for obtaining patient consent is that it is the patient. Is there any moral basis for this approach to patients? There is the undoubted vulnerability of patients to negligent or incompetent or insensitive treatment by doctors, and their relative powerlessness and ignorance when it comes to certain decisions about their treatment. These things call for the protection of patients against those treating them, or perhaps for measures—legal and educational—that make patients more equal in decision-making processes affecting them. But the key thing—the thing that seems to make intelligible the kinds of moral duties that doctors have to inform patients and to act only when necessary and on the best information—is the vulnerability of patients. There is sometimes a blind spot in moral thinking with regard to the vulnerable and weak. The blind spot manifests itself in a certain pattern of suspicion that seems natural when something goes wrong and the weak or vulnerable suffer as a result. The presumption is that when the weak or vulnerable suffer in a transaction in which the strong are also involved, the weak are innocent, and the strong are probably responsible or should be foremost in offering to compensate the weak or vulnerable for what has happened. But there are many counter-examples to this way of thinking. The vulnerability of patients does not mean that they cannot be negligent and contribute significantly to bad health outcomes, even though it is much easier for a negligent or incompetent doctor to do much more harm. Relative vulnerability does not confer inability to do wrong. The vulnerability of patients does not confer innocence on them either. Nor does the autonomy of vulnerable people insulate them from responsibility for the consequences of decisions made jointly with doctors. This is indirectly acknowledged even by the conception of autonomy in mainstream medical ethics. The mainstream conception calls for the full consultation of patients by doctors in clinical decisions, and for the participation in clinical decision-making of patient advocates, and disinterested third parties—people who can make patients’ views better heard and respected and who can prevent their being paternalistically overridden. 530 PATIENTS’ RESPONSIBILITIES IN MEDICAL ETHICS The ideal that these arrangements apparently attempt to capture is that of a genuine partnership between clinician and patient in a course of treatment. The other side of the coin of treatment decisions reached in partnership, however, is joint responsibility for the outcomes, including cases where things go badly wholly as a result of these decisions, and the patient turns out to be harmed or disappointed. But, as we have already suggested, in actual cases where things go badly, the solidarity in decision-making is likely to break down: The fact that it is the patient and not the doctor who feels the bad effects, and the doctor and not the patient who emerges intact, seems to undo the partnership. A presumption of negligence can grow up that apparently frees the patient to sue, even when she is responsible for making the decisions that led to things going badly. 3. Patients and General Ethics: Respect for Persons and Duties of Citizens 3.1. Respect for Persons Some of the duties which patients have to their doctors (and other health care workers) come from a general obligation upon everyone to respect other people. One example of bad patient behaviors serves to illustrate: Whilst waiting for treatment in accident and emergency, a patient complains constantly and abusively to the nurses and reception staff about having to wait his turn. When he sees the doctor, he begins to swear again and finally punches the doctor. In this case, the wrongdoing is the same and is of a kind dealt with in general ethics: The patient fails to show the respect for persons that is due to anyone, not just health care professionals. Anyone who swears at others or hits them without provocation is doing something wrong, regardless of the role of the person sworn at or attacked. And the basis of the wrong is disrespect. 3.2. Patients as Citizens Patients may attempt to justify their negligence by saying that the taxes they pay on cigarettes or their contributions to national insurance mean that they have paid for the treatment they need as the result of ignoring medical advice. This argument is often used in an unsophisticated way, for it overlooks all the tax-financed benefits that go beyond health care that people enjoy. But even if all patients who ignored medical advice were net contributors to the welfare state, the argument would still be flawed. The justification for the welfare state is not only that of egoism (I pay my taxes so that I will benefit if the need arises).
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